Reviews for Great circle
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
The intertwined journeys of an aviatrix born in 1914 and an actress cast to play her a century later.In a novel twice as long as and an order of magnitude more complex than the well-received Seating Arrangements (2012) and Astonish Me (2014), Shipstead reveals breathtaking range and skill, expertly juggling a multigenerational historical epic and a scandal-soaked Hollywood satire, with scenes playing out on land, at sea, and in the air. "We were both products of vanishment and orphanhood and negligence and airplanes and uncles. She was like me but wasn't. She was uncanny, unknowable except for a few constellations I recognized from my own sky": These are the musings of actress Hadley Baxter. She has been familiar with the story of Marian Graves, an aviatrix who disappeared while trying to circumnavigate the globe, since she was just a little girlbefore she became a pop-culture phenomenon, turned into a movie star with a mega-franchise, accidentally destroyed her career, and was given the chance to reinvent herself...by playing Marian in a biopic. The film, Peregrine, is based at least partly on the logbook of Marian's "great circle," which was found wrapped in a life preserver on an ice floe near the South Pole. Shipstead's story begins decades earlier, with the christening of the Josephina Eterna in Glasgow in 1909. The unhappy woman who breaks the bottle on her bow, the laconic captain who takes the ship to sea, the woman he beds onboard, the babies that result from this unionMarian Graves and her twin, Jamiethe uncle who has to raise them when their mother drowns and their father disappears: The destinies of every one of these people, and many more unforgettable characters, intersect in ways that reverberate through a hundred years of story. Whether Shipstead is creating scenes in the Prohibition-era American West, in wartime London, or on a Hollywood movie set, her research is as invisible as it should be, allowing a fully immersive experience.Ingeniously structured and so damn entertaining; this novel is as ambitious as its heroinesbut it never falls from the sky. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Publishers Weekly
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Shipstead (Seating Arrangements) returns with a breathtaking epic of a female aviator. In 1914, infant twins Marian and Jamie Graves are sent to their dissolute uncle in Montana after their mother dies. There, a married pair of barnstormers inspires 12-year-old Marian, who feels “only lightness” as a passenger during a roll, loop, and nosedive. As a teen trucking hootch during Prohibition, Marian makes a delivery to a brothel, where she meets bootlegger Barclay Macqueen, who sponsors her interest in flying. Later Barclay traps her in a disastrous marriage, and she flees to become a bush pilot in Alaska. Her subsequent exploits are thrillingly and perceptively chronicled: during WWII, she ferries Spitfires for the RAF, and in 1949 embarks on a fateful pole-to-pole circumnavigation of the globe, which leads to a crash in Antarctica, after which she is assumed to have died. Shipstead interweaves stories of Jamie, who becomes an artist and draws battle scenes during WWII, and of her wartime lover, Ruth, with asides about historic aviators (many of them women), and convincingly conveys her characters’ yearning for connection, freedom, and purpose. In a present-day narrative, film star Hadley Baxter, herself orphaned by a plane crash, is cast to portray Marian, an ambitious move for Hadley after having been known for her role in a Twilight-esque fantasy series. Shipstead manages to portray both Marian’s and Hadley’s expanded sense of consciousness as they push the boundaries inscribed around them—Marian’s through flight and Hadley’s through creative inspiration (a particularly colorful scene has her zooming on psychedelic mushrooms). This is a stunning feat. (May)
Library Journal
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
After being fired from a popular film franchise, owing to a tabloid scandal, young actress Hadley is cast in a film where she'll play Marian Graves, an aviator who disappeared in 1950 while she was trying to circumnavigate the globe. The bulk of the novel is a chronological account of Marian's life, interspersed with interludes of Hadley's journey of self-discovery. Marian experiences many adventures across the first half of the 20th century. She and her twin brother Jamie, who becomes an artist, survive a shipwreck as infants and grow up in Montana. At an early age, Marian develops an ambition to fly; to achieve her goal, she strikes a dangerous bargain with a bootlegger, whom she eventually marries. Later, she becomes a transport pilot in World War II. Along the way, she changes her identity several times and sleeps with (and occasionally falls in love with) both men and women, before her final fateful journey. VERDICT This new work from the award-winning Shipstead (Seating Arrangements) justifies its length, by its intricately designed plot and by giving its compelling cast of characters room to breathe. As Hadley learns some of Marian's secrets—the ones that weren't in the script—readers will wonder how much we can truly know anyone. Highly recommended.—Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
The intertwined journeys of an aviatrix born in 1914 and an actress cast to play her a century later. In a novel twice as long as and an order of magnitude more complex than the well-received Seating Arrangements (2012) and Astonish Me (2014), Shipstead reveals breathtaking range and skill, expertly juggling a multigenerational historical epic and a scandal-soaked Hollywood satire, with scenes playing out on land, at sea, and in the air. "We were both products of vanishment and orphanhood and negligence and airplanes and uncles. She was like me but wasn't. She was uncanny, unknowable except for a few constellations I recognized from my own sky": These are the musings of actress Hadley Baxter. She has been familiar with the story of Marian Graves, an aviatrix who disappeared while trying to circumnavigate the globe, since she was just a little girl—before she became a pop-culture phenomenon, turned into a movie star with a mega-franchise, accidentally destroyed her career, and was given the chance to reinvent herself...by playing Marian in a biopic. The film, Peregrine, is based at least partly on the logbook of Marian's "great circle," which was found wrapped in a life preserver on an ice floe near the South Pole. Shipstead's story begins decades earlier, with the christening of the Josephina Eterna in Glasgow in 1909. The unhappy woman who breaks the bottle on her bow, the laconic captain who takes the ship to sea, the woman he beds onboard, the babies that result from this union—Marian Graves and her twin, Jamie—the uncle who has to raise them when their mother drowns and their father disappears: The destinies of every one of these people, and many more unforgettable characters, intersect in ways that reverberate through a hundred years of story. Whether Shipstead is creating scenes in the Prohibition-era American West, in wartime London, or on a Hollywood movie set, her research is as invisible as it should be, allowing a fully immersive experience. Ingeniously structured and so damn entertaining; this novel is as ambitious as its heroines—but it never falls from the sky. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
Emblematic of the legions of women who chafe at the notion of being tethered to Earth, female pilots have long beguiled authors as exemplars of those bound to seek answers to perennial questions of desires and needs, expectations and disappointments. Through the lightly interwoven stories of impetuous flyer Marian Graves and flavor-of-the-month actress Hadley Baxter, Shipstead (Astonish Me, 2014) ponders the motivating forces behind acts of daring and defiance, self-fulfillment and self-destruction. Marian’s sprawling life story forms the bulk of this rolling, roiling epic, from the improbability of her survival as an infant rescued from a sinking ocean liner to her tempestuous marriage to a Prohibition-era bootlegger to her days as a thrill-seeking WWII air transport pilot to her Earhartesque disappearance during a pole-to-pole flight. Tapped to play Marian in a biopic about her doomed aerial expedition, Hadley hopes to find in Marian’s story the inspiration to help her course-correct her own turbulent life. An ambitious, soaring saga, Shipstead’s transcendent tale takes her characters to dizzying heights, drawing readers into lives of courage and mystery.
